Mikado: a jewelry of melancholy and moving comedy (critic)
The director of Youssef Salem is successful leaves the field of pure comedy with this film which speaks with great acuity of parental education and marginality.
What is the best possible education for her children? What are the limits of the choice to live voluntarily in marginality to protect his own from the violence of the world? Here are the questions that dominate the new Baya Kasmi (Youssef Salem is successful). The first written without Michel Leclerc. And the first also where, without it being absent, the comedy does not dictate the tempo. Because here, the tone is soft or even melancholy, marrying the mood fluctuations of his characters. Starting with that of Mikado (Félix Moati, intense), the kid of the DDASS, who has become a thirties flayed live because always carrying in him the stigma of a childhood in suffering spent in a foster family that he keeps harassing so that she recognizes her wrongs and who, by complaining complaints for harassment, forces him to take the road to his partner (Vimala Imperial) and their two children to escape the police. And it is on the way, after a breakdown, that they will meet Vincent (Ramzy Bédia, luminous), a teacher living alone with his daughter, with whom they will settle for a summer that will question everyone’s certainties. Baya Kasmi signs here a film under a tension all the more throbbing as it contrasts with the apparent sweetness of the exchanges and the bias of a warm and sensual light. The quality of writing of the characters, this way of telling their contradictions without being a lawyer, the procure or the judge makes this story endearing without paying into the sensitiveness. A remarkably orchestrated side step.
By Baya Kasmi. With Vimala Pons, Félix Moati, Ramzy Bedia… Duration 1h34. Released April 9, 2025
